Yogi Berra
Yogi Berra, Yankee Who Built His Stardom 90 Percent on Skill and Half on Wit, Dies at xc
Yogi Berra, one of baseball's greatest catchers and characters, who every bit a player was a mainstay of 10 Yankees championship teams and as a manager led both the Yankees and the Mets to the World Series — but who may be more widely known as an ungainly just lovable cultural effigy, inspiring a cartoon character and issuing a seemingly limitless supply of unwittingly witty epigrams known as Yogi-isms — died on Tuesday. He was 90.
The Yankees and the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Heart in Little Falls, N.J., announced his death. Before moving to an assisted living facility in nearby W Caldwell, in 2012, Berra had lived for many years in neighboring Montclair.
In 1949, early in Berra's Yankees career, his director assessed him this way in an interview in The Sporting News: "Mr. Berra," Casey Stengel said, "is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities."
And so he was, and and so he proved to be. Universally known just as Yogi, probably the second about recognizable nickname in sports — even Yogi was non the Baby — Berra was not exactly an unlikely hero, merely he was often portrayed as one: an All-Star for fifteen sequent seasons whose skills were routinely underestimated; a well-built, appealingly open-faced human being whose physical appearance was oftentimes belittled; and a prolific winner, not to mention a successful leader, whose intellect was a target of sense of humor if non outright derision.
That he triumphed on the diamond again and again in spite of his perceived shortcomings was certainly a source of his popularity. So was the please with which his famous, if not e'er documentable, pronouncements — somehow both nonsensical and sagacious — were received.
"Y'all tin notice a lot merely by watching," he is reputed to have declared once, describing his strategy as a managing director.
"If yous can't imitate him," he brash a young histrion who was mimicking the batting stance of the great slugger Frank Robinson, "don't copy him."
"When y'all come up to a fork in the road, accept information technology," he said, giving directions to his house. Either path, it turned out, got you in that location.
"Nobody goes in that location anymore," he said of a popular restaurant. "Information technology's too crowded."
Whether Berra actually uttered the many things attributed to him, or was the first to say them, or phrased them precisely the fashion they were reported, has long been a matter of speculation. Berra himself published a book in 1998 called "The Yogi Book: I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said!" Simply the Yogi-isms testified to a character — goofy and philosophical, flighty and down to earth — that came to define the homo.
Berra's Yogi-ness was exploited in advertisements for myriad products, amid them Puss 'n Boots cat nutrient and Miller Lite beer but perhaps most famously Yoo-Hoo chocolate drinkable. Asked if Yoo-Hoo was hyphenated, he is said to accept replied, "No, ma'am, it isn't even carbonated."
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A Yankee Great
Marty Appel, author of "Pinstripe Empire" and a one-time public relations director for the Yankees, remembers Yogi Berra.
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If non exactly a Yogi-ism, information technology was the kind of response that might have come from Berra's ursine namesake, the affable animated graphic symbol Yogi Carry, who fabricated his debut in 1958.
An Impressive Résumé
The character Yogi Berra may even have overshadowed the Hall of Fame ballplayer Yogi Berra, obscuring what a remarkable athlete he was. A notorious bad-ball hitter — he swung at a lot of pitches that were not strikes but mashed them anyway — he was fearsome in the clutch and the most durable and consistently productive Yankee during the flow of the team's about relentless success.
In addition, as a catcher, he played the about grueling position on the field. (For a respite from the chores and challenges of crouching behind the plate, Berra, who played before the designated hitter rule took event in the American League in 1973, occasionally played the outfield.)
Stengel, a Hall of Fame manager whose shrewdness and talent were as well often underestimated, recognized Berra's gifts. He referred to Berra, even as a young actor, as his banana managing director and compared him favorably to star catchers of previous eras like Mickey Cochrane, Gabby Hartnett and Pecker Dickey. "You could look it up" was Stengel's catchphrase, and indeed the record book declares that Berra was among the greatest catchers in the history of the game — some say the greatest of all.
Berra's career batting average, .285, was not every bit high every bit that of his Yankees predecessor, Dickey (.313), but Berra hitting more than abode runs (358 in all) and drove in more runs (1,430). Praised by pitchers for his astute pitch-calling, Berra led the American League in assists 5 times and from 1957 through 1959 went 148 consecutive games backside the plate without making an error, a major league record at the fourth dimension.
He was not a defensive wizard from the start, though. Dickey, Berra explained, "learned me all his experience."
On defense, he certainly surpassed Mike Piazza, the best-striking catcher of contempo vintage, and maybe ever. On offense, Berra and Johnny Bench, whose Cincinnati Reds teams of the 1970s were known as the Big Red Machine, were comparable, except that Demote struck out 3 times as often. Berra whiffed a mere 414 times in more than 8,300 plate appearances over nineteen seasons — an astonishingly small ratio for a power hitter.
Others — Carlton Fisk, Gary Carter and Ivan Rodriguez amid them — besides deserve consideration in a word of keen catchers, but none was clearly superior to Berra on offense or defense force. Simply Roy Campanella, a contemporary rival who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and faced Berra in the World Series vi times before his career was ended by a car accident, equaled Berra's full of three Virtually Valuable Player Awards. And although Berra did not win the award in 1950 — his teammate Phil Rizzuto did — he gave one of the greatest flavor-long performances by a catcher that year, hitting .322, smacking 28 home runs and driving in 124 runs.
Big Moments
Berra's career was punctuated past storied episodes. In Game three of the 1947 Globe Series, against the Dodgers, he hitting the first compression-hit dwelling run in Series history, and in Game iv he was behind the plate for what was near the start no-hitter and was instead a stunning loss. With 2 outs in the ninth inning and two men on base after walks, the Yankees' starter, Neb Bevens, gave up a double to Cookie Lavagetto that cleared the bases and won the game.
In September 1951, once over again on the brink of a no-hitter, this one by Allie Reynolds against the Boston Carmine Sox, Berra made one of baseball game's famous errors. With two outs in the 9th inning, Ted Williams hit a towering foul brawl between home plate and the Yankees' dugout. It looked similar the terminate of the game, which would seal Reynolds's 2nd no-hitter of the season and make him the start American League pitcher to reach that feat. But as the ball plummeted, information technology was defenseless in a gust of air current; Berra lunged backward, and it deflected off his glove as he went sprawling.
Amazingly, on the next pitch, Williams striking an almost identical pop-upwardly, and this time Berra caught information technology.
In the first game of the 1955 World Serial against the Dodgers, the Yankees were ahead, 6-iv, in the top of the eighth when the Dodgers' Jackie Robinson stole home. The plate umpire, Bill Summers, called him prophylactic, and Berra went berserk, gesticulating in Summers'due south face and creating ane of the enduring images of an on-the-field tantrum. The Yankees won the game although not the Serial — it was the only time Brooklyn got the better of Berra's Yankees — but Berra never forgot the moment. More than 50 years after, he signed a photograph of the play for President Obama, writing, "Beloved Mr. President, He was out!"
During the 1956 Series, again against the Dodgers, Berra was at the center of another enduring prototype, this one of sheer joy, when he leapt into the arms of Don Larsen, who had only struck out Dale Mitchell to cease Game v and complete the only perfect game (and only no-hitter) in Earth Serial history.
When reporters gathered at Berra'south locker subsequently the game, he greeted them mischievously. "And so," he said, "what's new?"
Beyond the historic moments and private accomplishments, what most distinguished Berra's career was how often he won. From 1946 to 1985, as a role player, coach and manager, Berra appeared in a remarkable 21 Earth Series. Playing on powerful Yankees teams with teammates similar Rizzuto and Joe DiMaggio early on and and so Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle, Berra starred on World Serial winners in 1947, '49, '50, '51, '52, '53, '56 and '58. He was a backup catcher and part-time outfielder on the championship teams of 1961 and '62. (He also played on World Series losers in 1955, '57, 'lx and '63.)
All told, his Yankees teams won the American League pennant 14 out of 17 years. He yet holds Series records for games played, plate appearances, hits and doubles.
No other player has been a champion so ofttimes.
Lawrence Peter Berra was born on May 12, 1925, in the Italian enclave of St. Louis known equally the Hill, which as well fostered the baseball career of his boyhood friend Joe Garagiola. Berra was the fourth of v children. His father, Pietro, a construction worker and stonemason, and his mother, Paulina, were immigrants from Malvaglio, a northern Italian village almost Milan. (As an adult, on a visit to his ancestral domicile, Berra took in a performance of "Tosca" at La Scala. "It was pretty proficient," he said. "Even the music was prissy.")
As a boy, Berra was known as Larry, or Lawdie, as his female parent pronounced information technology. Every bit recounted in "Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee," a 2009 biography by Allen Barra, ane solar day in his early on teens, young Larry and some friends went to the movies and were watching a travelogue most Bharat when a Hindu yogi appeared on the screen sitting cross-legged. His posture struck one of the friends as precisely the manner Berra sabbatum on the ground equally he waited his turn at bat. From that twenty-four hours on, he was Yogi Berra.
An ardent athlete but an indifferent student, Berra dropped out of school later the eighth grade. He played American Legion ball and worked odd jobs. Equally teenagers, he and Garagiola tried out with the St. Louis Cardinals and were offered contracts by the Cardinals' general manager, Branch Rickey. Merely Garagiola's came with a $500 signing bonus and Berra's merely $250, and then Berra declined to sign. (This was a harbinger of deals to come. Berra, whose salary as a player reached $65,000 in 1961, substantial for that era, proved to be a canny contract negotiator, about always extracting concessions from the Yankees' penurious general manager, George Weiss.)
In the concurrently, the St. Louis Browns — they later moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles — also wanted to sign Berra but were not willing to pay any bonus at all. And so, the day after the 1942 World Series, in which the Cardinals beat the Yankees, a Yankees coach showed up at Berra'southward parents' house and offered him a minor league contract — along with the elusive $500.
A Fan Favorite
Berra's professional baseball game life began in Virginia in 1943 with the Norfolk Tars of the Class B Piedmont League. In 111 games he hitting .253 and led the league's catchers in errors, but he reportedly once had 12 hits and drove in 23 runs over two consecutive games. It was a promising start, but Globe War 2 put his career on hold. Berra joined the Navy. He took office in the invasion of Normandy and, two months later on, in Operation Dragoon, an Allied assault on Marseilles in which he was bloodied past a bullet and earned a Regal Heart.
In 1946, after his discharge, he was assigned to the Newark Bears, and so the Yankees' summit subcontract team. He played outfield and catcher and hit .314 with fifteen dwelling runs and 59 R.B.I. in 77 games, although his fielding even so lacked smooth; in ane instance he striking an umpire with a throw from behind the plate meant for 2d base. But the Yankees nonetheless summoned him in September. In his offset large league game, he had ii hits, including a home run.
Paradigm 
Equally a Yankee, Berra became a fan favorite, partly because of his superior play — he batted .305 and drove in 98 runs in 1948, his second full season — and partly because of his humility and guilelessness. In 1947, honored at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, a nervous Berra told the hometown crowd, "I want to thank everyone for making this dark necessary."
Berra was a hit with sportswriters, too, although they often portrayed him as a baseball idiot savant, an apelike, barely literate devotee of comic books and movies who spoke fractured English. And then was born the Yogi extravaganza, of the triumphant rube.
"Fifty-fifty today," Life magazine wrote in July 1949, "he has but pity for people who clutter their brains with such unnecessary and frivolous matters as literature and the sciences, not to mention grammar and orthography."
Collier's magazine declared, "With a trunk that but an anthropologist could love, the 185-pound Berra could pass easily equally a fellow member of the Neanderthal A.C."
Berra tended to take the gibes in step. If he was ugly, he was said to have remarked, it did not matter at the plate. "I never saw nobody hit one with his face," he was quoted equally proverb. But when writers chided him most his girlfriend, Carmen Curt, saying he was too unattractive to ally her, he responded, according to Colliers, "I'm homo, own't I?"
Berra outlasted the ridicule. He married Short in 1949, and the marriage endured until her death in 2014. He is survived by their 3 sons — Tim, who played professional football for the Baltimore Colts; Dale, a old infielder for the Yankees, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Houston Astros; and Lawrence Jr. — besides equally 11 grandchildren and a great-grandson.
Certainly, assessments of Berra changed over the years.
"He has connected to allow people to regard him as an amiable clown because it brings him quick credence, despite ample proof, on field and off, that he is intelligent, shrewd and opportunistic," Robert Lipsyte wrote in The New York Times in October 1963.
Success as a Director
At the time, Berra had just ended his career as a Yankees histrion, and the team had named him managing director, a office in which he continued to find success, although not with the same regularity he enjoyed as a actor and not without drama and disappointment. Indeed, things began badly. The Yankees, an aging team in 1964, played listless ball through much of the summertime, and in mid-August they lost iv direct games in Chicago to the first-place White Sox, leading to 1 of the kookier episodes of Berra'due south career.
On the squad passenger vehicle to O'Hare Airport, the reserve infielder Phil Linz began playing "Mary Had a Footling Lamb" on the harmonica. Berra, in a foul mood over the losing streak, told him to knock it off, but Linz did non. (In another version of the story, Linz asked Mickey Mantle what Berra had said, and Curtain responded, "He said, 'Play it louder.' ") Suddenly the harmonica went flying, having been either knocked out of Linz's hands past Berra or thrown at Berra by Linz. (Players on the bus had different recollections.)
News reports of the incident fabricated information technology sound every bit if Berra had lost control of the team, and although the Yankees caught and passed the White Sox in September, winning the pennant, Ralph Houk, the general manager, fired Berra after the team lost a seven-game World Series to St. Louis. In a baroque move, Houk replaced him with the Cardinals' manager, Johnny Keane.
Keane'southward Yankees finished sixth in 1965.
Berra, meanwhile, moved across town, taking a job as a coach for the famously awful Mets under Stengel, who was finishing his career in Flushing. The squad continued its mythic floundering until 1969, when the so-called Phenomenon Mets, with Gil Hodges equally manager — and Berra coaching first base — won the Earth Series.
After Hodges died, earlier the get-go of the 1972 flavour, Berra replaced him. That summer, Berra was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
The Mets squad he inherited, however, faltered, finishing 3rd, and for almost of the 1973 season they were worse. In mid-August, the Mets were well under .500 and in 6th place when Berra supposedly uttered perhaps the most famous Yogi-ism of all.
"It ain't over till information technology's over," he said (or words to that upshot), and lo and behold, the Mets got hot, squeaking by the Cardinals to win the National League's Eastern Division title.
They and so crush the Reds in the League Championship Serial before losing to the Oakland Athletics in the World Series. Berra was rewarded for the resurgence with a three-twelvemonth contract, but the Mets were dreadful in 1974, finishing fifth, and the next year, on Aug. 6, with the team in 3rd identify and having lost 5 straight games, Berra was fired.
Once again he switched leagues and metropolis boroughs, returning to the Bronx every bit a Yankees coach, and in 1984 the owner, George Steinbrenner, named him to replace the volatile Billy Martin equally manager. The team finished 3rd that year, but during bound grooming in 1985, Steinbrenner promised him that he would finish the flavour as Yankees manager no matter what.
Later on just 16 games, however, the Yankees were 6-ten, and the impatient and imperious Steinbrenner fired Berra anyway, bringing back Martin. Peradventure worse than breaking his word, Steinbrenner sent an underling to evangelize the bad news.
The firing, which had an added sting because Berra's son Dale had recently joined the Yankees, provoked one of baseball game's legendary feuds, and for fourteen years Berra refused to ready foot in Yankee Stadium, a period during which he coached four seasons for the Houston Astros.
In the meantime private donors helped establish the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center on the New Bailiwick of jersey campus of Montclair Land University, which awarded Berra an honorary doctorate of humanities in 1996. A minor league ballpark, Yogi Berra Stadium, opened there in 1998.
The museum, a tribute to Berra with exhibits on his career, runs programs for children dealing with baseball game history. In Jan 1999, Steinbrenner, who died in 2010, went in that location to make apology.
"I know I made a mistake by non letting you get personally," he told Berra. "It's the worst mistake I ever made in baseball game."
Berra chose non to quibble with the semi-apology. To welcome him back into the Yankees fold, the team held a Yogi Berra Day on July 18, 1999. Also invited was Larsen, who threw out the formalism first pitch, which Berra caught.
Incredibly, in the game that day, David Cone of the Yankees pitched a perfect game.
It was, every bit Berra may or may non accept said in some other context, "déjà vu all over once more," a fittingly climactic episode for a wondrous baseball life.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/24/sports/baseball/yogi-berra-dies-at-90-yankees-baseball-catcher.html
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